So I just uploaded the first update of my Enochian bibliography in 3 years yesterday, and have already found something calling for further remark. Actually got round to skimming through Skinner & Rankine's typeset (Practical Angel Magic of John Dee's Enochian Tables) of "The Practice of the Tables"[1] from Sloane MS. 307 (regrettably it's some way down the BL's priority list for digitising and placing online, although they teased us with a photograph of one page five years ago). The third set of conjurations in this are headed Janua Orientalis (or Occidentalis, &c.) Reserata and have strong parallels, beyond the title, to another English work of angel-magic of the period, the Janua Magica Reserata.[2]
The Janua scheme is based on the nine orders of Angels from the Celestial Hierarchies of pseudo-Dionysius, referred to the Kabbalistic Sephiroth excluding Malkuth (based on the scale of the number 10 in De Occulta Philosophia lib. II cap 13); however phrases from the English of Dee's Claves Angelicæ appear in the conjurations ("the servants of the same your god," "make us partakers of undefiled knowledge," "in power and presence, whose works shall be a Song of honour and the praise of your God in your Creation.") and Dee's interrogation of Ave (TFR p. 169), slightly paraphrased, is used as an example of how to ascertain the genuineness of supposed angelic manifestations (Treatise on Angel Magic, p. 185 ed, 2006, section "To know who it is").
At the moment I'm not sure who borrowed from whom; both definitely borrowed from TFR independently of each other, "The Practice of the Tables" much more extensively.[3]
EDIT: Well . . . on checking again, "To know who it is" in the Harley MS. 6482 Janua is not in the Sloane MS. 3825 version, the entire "Second Introduction" preceding the preliminary prayer and the Nine Celestial Keys is an interpolation by Smart or "Rudd." There is a near-parallel section in the first "Introduction" (McLean p. 176-177, cf. Sloane MS. 3825 42vo-43ro), which does not follow the TFR passage so closely; there is still some similar or identical phrasing, but Ave's responses are not quoted.
EDITED AGAIN: blech, still didn't check carefully enough. The "Second Introduction" wasn't interpolated by Smart / "Rudd," just moved from its original position after the "First Key," and added / changed section headings.
[1] I use this name as a convenience. Sloane MS. 307 has no overall title; it is described in the BL catalogue as "Magic. On the invocation of angels"; the defective and mucked-about version of Dee's "Tables of Enoch" which begins that copy is headed Clavicula Tabularum Enochi which name is sometimes applied to the whole work and was also used as the title of an edited extract from this work (omitting the verbose and repetitive conjurations that occupy about 80% of the page count in the typeset) circulated in the Ordo R.R. & A.C. as manuscript "H." "The Practice of the Tables," denoting a copy of this work, appears in as the first item of a contents list written at the start of Sloane MS. 3821, in a different hand to the main text; this most likely derived from internal section titles in the work where the first of the three sets of conjurations were headed "The Practice of the East Table," "The Practice of the West Table," &c. Skinner & Rankine called it Tabula Bonorum Angelorum Invocationes, a name previously used by Ashmole for the final untitled "book" of Dee's magic digests (Sloane MS. 3191 fol. 52vo-80vo).
[2] Versions of this text survive in Sloane MS. 3825 and the early 18th-century magical miscellany Harley MS. 6482 (the latter completely omitting the preliminary theoretical part, which in any case was mostly plagiarised from Cornelius Agrippa), in both cases followed by a version of the Lemegeton: typesets in Skinner & Rankine, Keys to the Gateway of Magic (mainly based on Sloane 3825 but incorporating interpolations from Harley 6482 and with a section on the demon kings of the quarters from a Liber Officiorum Spirituum fragment in Sloane MS. 3824 bolted on to the end) and McLean, A Treatise on Angel Magic (Harley 6482). Additionally, the conjurations or "Celestial Keys" were copied into the records of a group trying to contact various angels mentioned in Dee's spirit diaries, which survive in Sloane MS. 3628. For a discussion of Harley 6482, see E. Asprem, "False, Lying Spirits and Angels of Light" in Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft 3:1 (2008).
[3] Well, the more I've looked at this, the more I'm inclined to believe they are of common authorship.
Just in case -- though it's pretty unlikely -- the intersection of people who care about this subject and people who haven't worked it out yet is not an empty set, the title of this post and others on similar subjects is a parody of a line in Michael's description of the wonder-working "Ring of Solomon" in Mysteriorum Liber Primus (Action of 1582.03.14, Sloane MS. 3188 fol. 12ro). The header image is taken from the same MS. (images at www.bl.uk/manuscripts/).
EDITED (rather than making a new post and having to come up with another variant on the title)
Moving forward 200 years or a bit more, one of the things that the version of "Enochian Magic" taught and practiced in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (well, strictly, the "Second Order" to the H.O.G.D., the R.R. et A.C.) has been criticised and mocked is that the version of the Tables of Enoch published by F.I. Regardie and writers who cribbed from him, and apparently those used in the original organisation, feature up to four letters on a number of squares. Practically, the reason for this is quite simple: the source documents used by Mathers and Westcott (Sloane MS. 3191, Casaubon's True and Faithful Relation and Sloane MS. 307 apparently being the main ones) disagreed on a number of squares, and even the "fair copies" in 3191 have a number of corrections and crossings out, or instances of one letter being written in small below another. This study gives a rather dry run-through these variations and suggests possible ways of dealing with the issue in practice.
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